...CONTEXT Growing up, Suzanne Collins was a military brat. Her father was a career airman in the United States Air Force, as a result, Collins and her siblings—two older sisters and an older brother—moved around frequently, spending time in numerous locations in the eastern United States as well as in Europe. The military, in fact, played a leading role in the family’s history. Collins’s grandfather had served in World War I, her uncle served in World War II, and the year Collins turned six, her father left to serve his own tour in the Vietnam War. War, consequently, was a part of life for Collins, something very real and not just an abstract idea. While her father was gone, she would sometimes see video footage of the war zone on the news, and she recognized that her father was there fighting. Though her father returned after a year, Collins’s connection to war didn’t end. In addition to being a soldier, Collins’s father was also a military historian and a doctor of political science. That knowledge and experiences serving in the Air Force and fighting in Vietnam had a profound effect on his relationships with his children, and he made sure they learned what they could about war. While other girls’ fathers were telling them fairytales, Collins’s father educated her about military history. When the family was moved to Brussels, Belgium, for instance, her father educated her about the region’s violent history and took her on tours of the country’s historic battlefields. Eventually...
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...Being a ‘Team’ Player: The Linguistic Alteration of Identity in Online Communities Dedicated to The Hunger Games In the first chapter of Gender and Language, Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet discuss how the connection between language and gender enables a “continual performance” of gendered interactions (33), which, in turn, enables “social reproduction” founded on the separate categories of male and female. They argue that language not only reflects gendered categories but “constructs and maintains these categories” (34). Being such strong categories, they claim it is “impossible” to escape gendered behavior and not influence others to give gendered responses (50). In a later chapter, Eckert and McConnell-Ginet discuss how “gender schemas and ideologies” are implied and interpreted (203). Using an example from a university setting, the authors illustrate their point that the assumption of gender may not result from “the particulars of our exchange but in familiar gender stereotypes” (204). If no specific clues or pronouns are given during the exchange of information, presuppositions relying on stereotypes often emerge. Not only do stereotypes and behavior fill the linguistic gaps, but the power in individual words alone is a cause for concern. Sally McConnell-Ginet explores this further in her article “Words in the World: How and Why Meanings Can Matter.” She argues that single words can carry multiple meanings in each use whether the speaker means them to or not...
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...The Hunger Games: Action-film feminism is catching fire Lisa Schwarzbaum Burning up Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen is both strong and vulnerable – a new kind of action heroine who has powered The Hunger Games: Catching fire to a $158m US debut. (Lionsgate) Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen is a new type of female action film icon, and moviegoers should be very excited about that, writes Lisa Schwarzbaum. As Catching Fire ignites on movie screens around the world, this is what we know about the 21st Century heroine called Katniss Everdeen: she is strong but also soft. She is brave but she has doubts. She is a phenomenal fictional creation, yet is real enough that moviegoers can draw inspiration from her values, her resourcefulness, and her very human inner conflicts. And she is played by Jennifer Lawrence, who appears not only to be handling her current duties as Hollywood’s finest model of well-adjusted millennial female stardom but doing so with charm. Everdeen and Lawrence: golden girls both. Personified in Lawrence’s lithe movements and cool, focused gaze, Katniss is a brave, resourceful and independent-minded fighter; but she is also a troubled and vulnerably guilt-ridden human being. Nina Jacobson, the producer of the Hunger Games film franchise, puts it this way: “She is a singular heroine in that the burden of survival weighs on her. She has a ton of survivor’s guilt. And she keeps surviving.” Girl on fire It is strange that behaving like a well-adjusted...
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